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Katrina Notes: Blogging the relief effort

I'm headed down the southwest Louisiana to join the relief effort. In addition …

My girlfriend and I are headed down to the Gulf coast of Louisiana for the next few weeks to help with the hurricane relief effort. I'm from the Lake Charles, Louisiana area, and my hometown is now flooded with refugees. I'll be working with my local church as a volunteer and an organizer to help get them involved with the various shelters and other relief efforts that desperately need help. My girlfriend, Christina, is a newly minted graduate of the University of Chicago's social work school, and she'll be in Baton Rouge on the LSU campus helping out their social work staff.

I'll be blogging the relief effort in this space, so watch for updates. There are a few specific things that I want to focus on in my blogging and reporting.

First, I want to publish information and stories gathered from people on the ground about how the relief effort is going—what it's doing, what it's not doing, how it could do better, how the various state and local organizations fit together, etc. I'll also be gathering as much information as I can about the actual situation in New Orleans from people who've escaped. We're seeing a lot of stuff on the news right now about what's happening and what's not happening, and when the people who're now making their way out of the city today reach Lake Charles they'll have stories to tell.

Finally, since this is Ars Technica, I want to use this space to talk about and think about the ways that technology can be and is being used in the relief effort. I know that computers, laptops, etc. are being used to register refugees, and I've already seen a number of innovative, service-oriented, refugee-related websites crop up online. So there's plenty to talk about with respect to tech's impact on this disaster, and what technology can and can't do. This issue of technology's role in the recovery will be an ongoing story for the next few years, and I'd like to start covering it now from ground zero.

I'm certain that there will be plenty of ways for the tech community to get actively involved in the relief and rebuilding process. People who can contribute good ideas, server space, programming time, troubleshooting efforts, bandwidth, hardware, and so on will be in a position to have a direct impact on the lives of those displaced by this disaster. Not only is this a humanitarian disaster, but it's an information management and logistical problem of unprecedented scale and complexity. In my seven years at Ars Technica, I've seen the online tech community come together and do some amazing things—we can find a way to use technology and collective expertise to make a difference. I hope you'll join me here in thinking creatively about how to rebuild not just infrastructure, but lives.